Saturday, 23 June 2012

Green Blood Corpuscle

I have never heard of a Green Blood corpuscle. My kid is 100% sure that just like a red or white blood cell, the green blood cells exist. I could not give him an evidence against his belief. On googling, I learnt that although mammals and few animals have Red blood, some animals like crabs, crayfish, octopus, squids etc have blue blood and some marine worms have green blood!!( yuck- remembered Shrek, the ogre). People who are overdosed with sumatriptan can have their blood turned green, as a result of sulphhemoglobinemia!!

Sunday, 10 June 2012

Kitchenette Affairs

Again a lazy Sunday morning at home. After seeing the companionship of couple of potato farls and coffee Americano for the morning breakfast I was reminded to open the fridge to look out for some afternoon home dinner options.

Yes, there is a lettuce rather looking fresh, but the best before date was 2 days ago, and a cucumber which was leaping in front of other vegetables to establish its line of seniority for being the longest residing veggie in the fridge untouched. I silently acknowledged the growing tension in the fridge amongst the rival vegetables, 'Who is she going to pick at last?'

Oyster mushrooms are my husband's favourite and I promised that I will cook them for him today. The green beans are slightly tuning brown, so should I cook them today?

Decisions made. It’s a greens day today. I, at last opened the bag of lettuce, could see the British Soil coating the leaves, just gave a quick wash in the colander, started chopping them, when  my son was loudly enjoying a recipe shown on telly. He said, mum this recipe is mouth watering; we should try this at home.
It was the Saturday Kitchen but shown on Sunday brunch hour, how confusing? My son thought it was highlights of the program from previous day, I laughed, how can one show a highlight of a cooking program?, may be just show the main ingredients and skip the minor ingredients?? For God’s sakes, its not cricket or a football game!

The recipe was for ‘A Chocolate Cheesecake’. I was told that good cakes need eggs and good baking time. I am one of the few unfortunate people that don’t know how to crack an egg. This reminds me,
‘If an egg is broken by outside force -- LIFE ENDS : If an egg breaks from WITHIN - LIFE BEGINS
(I read this somewhere, not my quote)

Anyway, the ingredients for the recipe were missed on the telly but fortunately after 20min of  searching on internet the program was found,  I started noting down the ingredients, to my surprise, ‘No Eggs, No Baking needed’. SHOULD I TRY?

I don’t have at least 5 ingredients which are the dark choc, white doc, milk choc, cream cheese and choc digestives. All set for shopping now. My son was so enthusiastic that he picked the shopping basket then understood that it is rather easy to carry the shopping list than a shopping basket. Well well, all done.

For those who do cooking with measures, stop reading now. Although I have all the ingredients I could not simply stick to measures, I randomly blended things together.

The original recipe is as follows
400g-Milk Choc Digestive
75 g-Melted butter
800g-Cream cheese
4 TBsp-Icing sugar
100g-dark choc
300g-milk choc
100g-white choc

I prepared the second layer which is the filling and allowed it to set in the fridge when my son enquired about icing sugar when I realised, oops!! I did not add it to the filling (not that it mattered) I removed the cake tin from the fridge and tried to rescue the cake, retrospectively I feel I should have left it as it is because the icing sugar that I added was unfortunately lumpy and filling was setting, never mind.

Here is the picture before the cheesecake went into the fridge.









Hope this “Triple layer Chocolate Cheesecake” will serve good to our palate and taste buds as well. Cannot wait to dig in, YUM..!!